Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

One interest prompting my return to blogging is some writing I've been doing about "inclusiveness." I've written various pieces on the topic, and I touched on the issue in my recent book. Now I'm trying to put my thoughts together in what may turn into a series of articles or book. I'll be posting pieces of the analysis (the most recent post is an example) and I hope visitors comment on what they see.

I recently had an email exchange with a black man who's generally sympathetic with what I say but has some concerns. Here's the exchange, which I've edited somewhat in the interests of coherence, concision, and clarity.

Black Trad: I have been reading many of your articles online and tend to agree with you about most everything.

The modern technological outlook can't deal with issues of identity, because it abolishes essences--understandings of what things "really are"--in favor of measurable properties that fit the thing for particular chosen ends. That's why it's thought ignorant, irrational and abusive to treat someone differently because he's a man or a gypsy, but not because he has a particular educational certification or bureaucratic position.

Paul Gottfried makes some interesting points in a thinkpiece on white nationalists over at Takimag. His basic argument:

The rising generation cares even less than its parents about holding on to an inherited civilization. Most of my students in Western civ courses have only the vaguest idea of the figures in the Bible (including Jesus) and their knowledge of modern history is usually confined to such inanities as "Hitler was a bad man because he was intolerant."

The Senate immigration bill has been fended off and seems likely to die. It remains the case, however, that very few people in positions of public influence or responsibility want to enforce restraints on immigration, and in a country as large and complex as the United States it's hard to force something to happen if those responsible don't want it to happen.

Since I just complained about the mindlessness of present-day discussions of immigration and related issues, I suppose I should set forth a few points that should be added to the mix to improve rationality:

Linda Chavez, who makes her living as a conservative female Hispanic, has a column at Townhall that should really be read several times in full. A summary and selected quotes don't do it justice. In brief, though, her point--which she puts quite bluntly--is that the fuss over amnesty for illegal aliens is simply noise churned out by a tiny minority of irrational haters.

Some may harbor half-articulate doubts, but Catholics who want to be relevant have jumped on the bandwagon like everybody else. "Human rights" are now the sole moral basis of public discussion in the Western world. Rights rule, at least in theory. The bumper sticker says "question authority," but that doesn't apply to the authority of human rights. How could it, when human rights are the ultimate standards presumed to provide the basis for all legitimate questioning?

In a way, that seems odd. People would be alarmed if someone proclaimed a "universal crusade for righteousness" charged with transforming all human relations everywhere by all available means. Why is an international human rights movement different?

Catholic neocon George Weigel starts off a short piece (about Nancy Pelosi of all things) praising Philadelphia in the 50s as "a town of ethnic neighborhoods in which Catholic kids unselfconsciously identified themselves by parish... dang, it was great. Or, as another product of that period, Garry Wills, once wrote, 'Not a bad ghetto to grow up in.'" A few lines later he's attacking those who wanted to maintain ethnic and religious boundaries in Philadelphia and praising open housing legislation as the Catholic equivalent of opposing abortion. Is there something he hasn't thought through completely?

It may be misleading to call social positions that are in fact radically revisionist "mainstream" and "moderate," since the attempt to transform fundamental human relations is neither, but it's not dishonest. After all, if Gerry Ford didn't set the gold standard for the mainstream moderate American there is no such thing, and he supported government benefits for same sex couples. In the events surrounding his funeral many thought his social views worth emphasizing for that reason.

A few days ago I called Houston Baker a "thuggish hack," and mentioned him as an example of "the lost honor of academia." It seems to me that the information readily available on the internet supports those views (examples can be found here and here). Still, I was struck by how bad his situation is.

Insistence on ethnic diversity means trouble in activities where the nature of the activity goes with radical distinctions of status and reward. Here are some examples from today's Drudge Report: top chef attacked as "racist", Duke professors seek to defuse anti-lacrosse team ad. The problem won't go away. Different groups aren't going to end up equally successful in academic life or the fancy restaurant business. Attempts to equalize results don't succeed and only undermine the original point of the activity while adding layers of suspicion and injustice. (See this discussion of the Duke situation.) Isn't the lesson that where differences matter the attempt to eliminate all separation and discrimination is a bad idea? If people trust each other and think they can achieve something great let them join up and work together, if they don't let them go their separate ways and find something else. You can't force them to be happy together.

Steve Sailer's got a good article about bigshot Harvard social scientist Robert D. Putnam. Putnam's the guy behind Bowling Alone, a famous article (and then book) that documented the decline of civc engagement in America. More recently, as Sailer details, he's published a study showing that more ethnic diversity means less social trust, not only between but even within ethnic groups.

The logic of discrimination theory never quits. If there's a group of people with problems, then the problems are caused by irrational and unjust social discrimination, and comprehensive forcible action is called for to root out and compensate for the discrimination. No other view of the situation is conceivable. A recent example: the British government's social exclusion unit has just "exposed" how millions of lives are being destroyed, not by mental illness -- that would be blaming something about the victim, and therefore the victim himself -- but by the stigma attached to mental illness. A couple of examples of how lives are being ruined:

"Inclusiveness" is a basic principle of present-day liberalism and its most important engine of power. It searches the whole of social life to extirpate everything inconsistent with the absolute universal domination of liberal institutions.

Brigitte Bardot and her publisher have been fined 5,000 Euros each for being on the wrong side of current social issues. The immediate basis of the fines was publication of a book some people found objectionable on acccount of its comments on immigrants, in-your-face homosexuals, and whatnot. Judging by excerpts, the book was no less thoughtful in content or more abusive in language than things Christopher Hitchens gets praised for saying. It said the wrong things though -- its tendency was bad -- so Bardot and her publisher had to be shut up. The moral: those who have nothing to assert respond to disagreement with physical force. Since we are governed by nothingness pretending to be something, self-righteous hypocrisy is now a normal part of government.

As the cultural Left consolidates its control over public life, it's going to be more and more difficult for people who object to leftist goals to look like good Americans as officially defined. So I think we're likely to see more stories like these:

• A couple of respected Southern Baptists are proposing a convention resolution asking members to remove their children from public schools. The resolution goes beyond the usual complaints about sex ed and whatnot and takes the view that government schools are a bad thing as such and cannot be reformed. That view seems sensible from a Baptist perspective, since Baptists are strong on both religiously-centered education and strict separation of church and state. Mainstreamist commentators (who of course don't like the resolution) say it most likely won't come before convention, and if presented won't pass. We'll see what happens -- regardless of any peculiarities of the resolution and situation the issue isn't going away.
• Meanwhile, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is asking the IRS to investigate "electioneering" by the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs. Bishop Sheridan recently issued a pastoral letter telling local Catholics not to vote for candidates who support legal abortion, stem-cell research or euthanasia. According to Americans United, "Bishop Sheridan's letter is code language that says, 'Re-elect Bush and vote Republican' ... Sheridan is using a form of religious blackmail to steer votes toward the GOP." I doubt the request will get anywhere, since like other bureaucrats IRS bureaucrats like to avoid hot issues, and since Bishop Sheridan ought to have a good argument that the letter isn't partisan "code" but a statement of accepted doctrine he'd apply in a consistent manner in any setting. Still, you can't get a tax exemption if your activities violate public policy, and Catholic teaching, simply by staying what it is, more and more violates fundamental public policy as set forth in legislative findings, constitutional adjudications, international human rights treaties, etc., etc., etc. So I think this kind of complaint is likely eventually to make some headway.
• A couple of administrators at Temple U tried to have a student committed to a psycho ward because he objected to the play "Corpus Christi", which portrayed Christ and His disciples as active homosexuals. A specific feature of liberalism is that it can't allow for dissent, since it makes individual desire the standard of value and so can't treat a disinclination to go along with liberalism as a sane act without destroying its own claim to rightful authority. All those who listen to the authorities know of course that there's something psychologically wrong with right-wingers. So I think what the Temple U administrators have done has a glorious future too.

Looks like the short New York Times knockoff of Pat Buchanan's Death of the West I mentioned recently is only one of several. Daniel Pipes has an article in Jewish World Review (a Jewish writer in a Jewish publication, although both perhaps atypical) deploring the "hollowing out of Christianity" in Europe, the low birthrates there, and the resulting third-world (specifically, Muslim) immigration: The human comedy of the coming Muslim Europe. How will these themes play out in general public discourse if more people start talking about them? At FrontPage, for example -- a publication with hundreds of thousands of readers and somewhat of a mainstream presence -- Larry Auster has a hard-hitting article on Muslim radicals and immigrants calling for exclusions, roundups and deportations, even of citizens. It will be interesting to see what lines get drawn.

Here's a quick introduction to the case of David Reimer, a boy famously raised as girl after a botched circumcision, who recently killed himself. The Brothers Judd give a longer account with lots of links. The experiment was a colossal failure but was reported as a huge success, with loads of honors for the quack doctor who promoted it, because dominant social forces wanted it that way. I can't help but think that the case is helpful background for understanding other ventures in gender reconstruction, for example the one Mrs. Lewis is now forcing on Massachusetts or for that matter the campaign against "gender-based discrimination" in general. You can't just abolish 1,000,000,000 years of sexual differentiation because it's not PC, or so it seems to me.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the tolerance front:

• Dhimmi Watch points out that a British television documentary that shows Muslim men grooming under-age white girls for sex has been shelved, after lobbying by Muslim groups and intervention by the police, because of fears it could incite racial violence. The law, it seems, forbids the broadcast of materials that could even inadvertently stir up racial tension, at least near election time. One feature of the tolerant, inclusive and multicultural society is that you can't discuss outrageous conduct for fear of other outrageous conduct. (There have been lots of racial problems in Bradford, where the program was filmed.)
• And on the combined reconstructing-sex-and-grooming-underage-girls front, it appears that there is now an active sex toys for tots scene among Catholic (and other) elementary schoolgirls in New York City. Words fail me. (Cite via Larry Auster.)

A commenter writes:

The Brown v. Board decision should not be taken as the last word on the subject. The aim of Normals (Normals are people who prefer normalness, or so-called "conservatism," to degenerateness, or so-called "liberalism") should be the overthrow of Brown exactly as it is the overthrow of Roe.

I think there's something to this. Brown is quite a radical decision. From the standpoint of formal legal support it comes out of nowhere, and the Court immediately applied it without further argument to illegalize any sort of state racial classification and so overthrow long-established institutions. Evidently it stands for some principle that's overwhelmingly strong and far-reaching.

Later developments -- which those who pushed for Brown accepted as plainly correct and in fact necessary -- cast light on what that principle is. The busing cases said that the rule that racial classifications are so bad the Court doesn't need a law to command schools and cities to turn themselves upside down to get rid of them applies even to indirect racial classifications based on housing patterns. Grutter confirmed the view that racial classifications -- otherwise inconceivably evil -- are nonetheless good when they have the "benign" purpose of promoting diversity, neutralizing institutional racism, and so on. So the real point of Brown seems to be that as a matter of fundamental justice any tolerable legal order must treat the social existence of ethnic distinctions as an intolerable evil to be eradicated by all necessary means.

I don't think a more limited reading of Brown works. A more limited reading would say that it's OK if there's some private racial separation in fact even though state-supported separation is bad. But if private separation is OK, why is the principle that it's impermissible for the state to accommodate it, for example by allowing different schools for different communities, so strong that it precedes all positive constitutional law? And if the more limited reading doesn't work, then the whole of multiculturalism is implicit in Brown. That's what civil rights organizations believe. Why aren't they the best interpreters of their own victories?